Nintendo has taken down another 400 Switch emulator repositories on GitHub

Nintendo is again sweeping Switch emulator projects off the web — this latest round saw more than 400 GitHub repositories removed after seven DMCA takedown notices in a single day. This was reported by TorrentFreak.

All seven complaints targeted circumvention of technical protection measures (TPMs), not straightforward copyright claims. For Nintendo this tactic isn’t new: in 2024 the Yuzu team agreed to a $2.4 million settlement, and Ryujinx stopped development after Nintendo asked them to do so — devs bowed out, rather than fighting on.

Many of the deleted repos now show the publisher’s own takedown text in the main branch, a blunt explanation of Nintendo’s view.

Nintendo Switch emulators are primarily designed to run Nintendo Switch games, and therefore Nintendo Switch emulators illegally circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures in order to run unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games.

Under normal operating conditions, the technical protection measures require the use of information and processes authorized by Nintendo to gain access to works protected by Nintendo’s copyright.

TorrentFreak also points out an oddity: a good number of the removed repos arguably shouldn’t have been there at all — forks, mirrors, and copies (e.g., of projects already litigated, like Yuzu) that simply propagated before the originals were taken down.

Open-source code spreads fast, unfortunately. The original source for Yuzu and others had already been copied into hundreds of places; that makes repeat cleanups necessary because each wave only wipes out some of the copies.

Legally, Nintendo leans on Section 1201 of the US DMCA (sec. 1201), which bars circumvention of TPMs regardless of whether pirated game files are being handed out. That line of argument lets them ask for emulator source code to be removed, not just game images.